Christmas Cheer #2: Stocking Stuffers

Happy Friday!

Most people are super excited about the weekend, but in our house, it just means that there is more work than usual. These weekend shifts are killer!


On a happier and more festive note, I started picking stocking stuffers for Christmas morning! It took awhile, but I'm excited to play Santa! Check them out after the jump! (Note to family: Please don't click the link! Santa presents are a "surprise"!)

25 Days of Christmas Cheer

Happy December!

I am amazed that we don't have any snow yet. This is WISCONSIN! I hate cold weather, but once the calendar turns to December 1st, I am ready for snow! I've been slacking a little on posting regularly, but that's (hopefully) about to change. I'm going to be posting every day until Christmas with something festive. Warning: some may be boring, and you probably don't care, but I promise I'll have a couple tutorials or something to help bring some Christmas cheer into your homes, too :)

Christmas Cheer #1: Well, day one isn't very exciting. However, we are hosting Christmas at our house for the first time ever, so we a have a lot to get ready. Here's what went down at our house today:
1. Order stockings for everyone
2. Order lights for the tree
3. Turn on the Christmas Music!

There are still a lot of things on our Christmas to-do list, so hopefully we'll have more exciting Christmas Cheer for you soon! (If anything, maybe this post will make you feel better about how much further along in your decorating you are-ha!)

Grandma.

I was planning on putting up some pictures of our new entertainment stand with info on how we did it this week, but a wrench was thrown into the plan on Thursday morning. I got a phone call from my dad telling me that my Grandma was dying. Cory and I packed up the car at 10pm, picked up my brother, and drove to St. Louis. We got there around 4AM, and after a quick nap, there was a whirlwind of activity. We all met with Hospice Care around 9:30 am, and by 5:30pm, Grandma was at home in her own bed, just like she wanted. Unfortunately we could not stay as long as we would've liked due to everyone's schedules, so we had to say our final good-byes the next morning. We'll be thinking of her over the next few weeks, but sadly, I'm sure we'll be making the trip back down very soon.

I Love You, Grandma!

We've got Stripes!

Here is what our "living room" looked like before we moved in:

BLECH! (...sorry previous owners...)

We finally got some paint on the walls a couple weeks ago (I know, I suck at blogging as things are happening). We are huge Wisconsin Badger fans, so we wanted to do a Badger theme without having bright Cardinal Red EVERYWHERE. We settled in a red, white, and brown theme.

We started by painting the largest wall a nice, rich red (Behr's Paint & Primer in One in Allure). The rest of the walls were covered in two coats of an off-white (Behr's Swiss Coffee). With a couple of coats, and a few touch-ups to go, the room looked like this:

(Please ignore the crazy amount of things on our floor)

After living with it for a couple of days, I decided that the Swiss Coffee alone was just too light (for those of you who don't know me, I don't do well with lack of color!), and was trying to figure out how I could add color without straying from my color scheme. Inspiration struck when I was watching TLC's What Not To Wear and the room Stacy & Clinton were in while tearing apart this poor woman's wardrobe was horizontally striped with light browns. Perfect!! 

I was nervous about picking a color to coordinate, but I ended up with one that was just two shades lighter than the Swiss Coffee (Behr's Oyster). When I was painting it in the wall, I was pretty sure it was too light and was NOT happy about needing to do it all over, but it started out perfectly. My mom came over to help us measure, tape, and paint because she's fully awesome.

I was SUPER impatient and wanted to take all the tape off an hour after we painted, but it ended up needing an extra coat, and Cory convinced me to be patient (i.e. bribed me with food). FINALLY, we took the tape off (seriously, that's my favorite part), brought the couch in, and hooked up that TV!

...aaaaand here's our after:

I love my stripes!

To be perfectly honest, the room looks different already, but I'll be posting soon with how we made our super cheap and super awesome entertainment unit. 

Happy Halloween + Housewarming

After a week of menu planning, last-minute painting, and cleaning, our house was put together enough for a housewarming party! All the food was a huge hit- so here are some links to the recipes I used:

Appetizers:
Homemade Tomato Basil Soup: This was the first time I made homemade tomato soup, and it turned out really well! I ended up taking the whole tomatoes out and chopping them up a bit to make the soup a little smoother. Since we just did little cups of soup with mini grilled cheeses, the whole tomatoes made it hard to eat.
Ham & Cheese Sliders: These were absolutely amazing. I got some super tiny ham rolls, and all 24 of these were gone before dinner. For the sauce, I used fresh finely chopped onion in place of minced onion spice, and spicy dijon mustard in place of yellow mustard. I think they really added a lot to the sandwiches. I think I am going to make some more of them and keep them in the fridge so I can have them as snacks throughout the week.

Dessert:
Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffins: Even though, I don't like pumpkin, I knew everyone else did, so I thought I'd give these a try. They look super difficult, but they were actually really easy! The only additional tip I have is to use a hand mixer to make the cheesecake filling. In my first batch, I tried hand mixing it, and the texture just wasn't right. My professional tester (read: husband) preferred the second batch by far.
Pumpkin Pie Dip: As delicious as everything else was, this was by far every one's favorite. I sent extra home with most of our guests, including my mom, who is an AMAZING cook (I was so proud of myself!) We put out fresh orchard apples and cinnamon sugar graham crackers as dippers- they both were flying off the plate. If you want something super easy to take to a holiday party, I definitely recommend this!

For drinks, we had spiked hot apple cider and an array of Oktoberfest beers, as well as some Sprecher Root Beer for anyone who didn't want alcohol. It was overall a great night, and I wish we had more leftovers so I could have some for lunch today!

Budgeting

While looking for inspiration for the empty bedrooms in our house, the discussion of a nursery has come up more than once. However, in order to fill said nursery, we need to save up some money and set a household budget. If you're like me, you kind of guess how much you are spending each month, and pay things off as you can. We go out to eat a few times a week, and buy things for the house as we need them (what, a sweater is TOTALLY a household item!), and try to figure out where all of our extra money went at the end of the month. I tried making a spreadsheet, but since my husband and I just recently joined bank accounts, it was difficult to figure out who owed what, and how much extra we had, let alone figure out what we could save.

Enter www.mint.com. This website is SO cool! I've only spent a little over an hour on it so far, but the ability to enter as many bank accounts, credit cards, loans, etc as we need to so we can BOTH see what's happening is great! It also comes up with a budget for you and tells you when you go over. My favorite part so far (other than the fact that it said I was underbudget on my clothes allowance) is send me tips and tricks on how to save money and improve my credit score. I'm obsessed with this little app-and yep! it's available on smart phones, too!

There are a couple of other budgeting ideas I have seen that I like, but one in particular from todaysnest.com that I think would work great in conjunction with the wonderfulness of mint.com. For the full details (and printable envelopes), check out this link: http://www.todaysnest.com/todays-nest/2010/09/todays-money-budgeting-with-cash-envelopes.html

I'll post pictures of my envelopes once I print them out and get this started!

Our House: Before

I've spent the majority of my morning painting and taping, and taping and painting, so I thought I would take a break to remember how much progress we have made. Here are some photos of our house when it was on the market.

My walls are on their way to being more colorful! More updates to come!